Lean Left

Tammy Faye: The Best of Them All

by KTK

July 22nd, 2007

The press reports that Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, best known as Tammy Faye Bakker, died in hospice two days ago after years of treatment for cancer. She had become a national joke for her outré makeup and hyperemotional manner, displayed in TV interviews after her sleazeball rapist embezzler televangelist husband Jim Bakker was exposed in what was then described as a “sex scandal” involving “infidelity” (he raped his secretary and then paid her hush money not to report it). That led to the discovery that he had stolen over $150 million of his sheeple’s tax-free religious contributions from his own ministry, and he went to jail for 8 years. But there was much more, and much better, to her than that.

Tammy Faye was not guilty of Jim Bakker’s crimes, but she was hardly innocent - she could not have been in the dark as to how they could afford their infamously indulgent lifestyle on a minister’s salary, and she went to lengths to contribute to the circus of protest and anguish that both Bakkers relied on to try to save their media empire. Both blamed their troubles on others, claiming rival televangelists were plotting against them (true) and that the secretary had “seduced” Jim (unforgivable). But she achieved a kind of redemption after divorcing Bakker while he was in prison.

In fact, despite her somewhat off-putting flamboyance, she behaved with a dignity and forthrightness that was only recognized in retrospect. She wore lots of makeup, she said, because it made her feel pretty and sparked her husband’s sexual interest - which, I would think, would be the right reasons to do so. She knew she was made fun of for her non-fashion-model appearance, and went ahead and did her thing anyway - which implies a lot more class than was displayed by her taunters (me among them, at one time, I’m sorry to say). Late in life she actually appeared at drag queen events and personally judged “Tammy Faye Baker Lookalike” contests with good humor. Most important of all, she was an almost-unheard-of example of a decent, genuinely warm, non-hateful Christian televangelist.

Always remaining an outspoken evangelical Christian, she went on to become a figurehead for a kind of welcoming Christianity not predicated on division or prejudice; she never again stooped as low as during the Bakker/Swaggart/Falwell/Oral Roberts crapfest. In particular, she developed a friendly alliance with the gay community. Even during her televangelist years, she had made a point of offering tolerance to gays; she claims that the Bakkers’ show “The PTL Club” was the only televangelist show that explicitly embraced gays. Later, two gay friends made a campy biographical film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, in which she appeared and which became a huge hit in the gay community. She spent years thereafter making celebrity appearances at Pride festivals and cross-dressing shows. (Oddly, she also became friends with porn mega-star Ron Jeremy, after they met on a reality TV show.)

She once told Larry King:

When I went — when we lost everything, it was the gay people that came to my rescue, and I will always love them for that.

That empathy ran both ways:

So many things have happened to the gay people — they’ve been made fun of, they’ve been put down, they’ve been misunderstood. A couple of the gay guys told me, “We put [Eyes of Tammy Faye] on every time we get discouraged.”

As part of the sex/embezzlement/payoffs/tax evasion/etc. scandals, the top-tier televangelist vultures fought over control of the Bakker empire. Jimmy Swaggart kicked the whole thing off by threatening to expose Bakker’s “affair” seven years after the fact, in an attempt to have Bakker disrobed by the Assemblies of God church, which would have triggered a clause in his Heritage USA charter granting ownership to AoG. To evade that clause, Bakker signed it over to Jerry Falwell on a handshake agreement that Falwell would give it back when Bakker was ready; Falwell later double-crossed his fellow man of God and kept the property for himself. The Bakkers’ first TV show, “The 700 Club”, wound up as Pat Robertson’s personal fraudulent cash cow. [Robertson owned the show from the beginning, and merely took over the Bakkers' talk show after they left the station. My mistake.] And through it all - after her many trials, failures, and excesses, and her long association with the cream of the evangelical sleaze - Tammy Faye emerged as an ebulliently loving, accepting, joyous and flamboyant person. Among them all - Bakker, Swaggart, Falwell, Robertson (and throw in Oral Roberts, too, who was pulling his “give me $8 million or God will kill me” stunt [god, what a lost opportunity that was!] just as the Bakker scandal broke) - she was the only one who never stooped to homophobia, and never used hatred as a justification for her own bad behavior, or a reason for others to behave likewise.

Not only was she not like the other televangelists, she rose far above their level, transcending her teaching and background to embrace and celebrate - and receive the same in return from - those whom her entire life and culture would otherwise have been dedicated to destroying.

Well done, Tammy Faye.

UPDATE: Corrected reference to Pat Robertson & “The 700 Club”.

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